THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO HAS FOLLOWED, FAVED, OR REVIEWED, I LOVE YOU ALL AND I WILL GIVE YOU HOMEMADE INTERNET CARAMEL CORN (that my sister made) SO BE THANKFUL! *showers readers in caramel corn*
Reality Checking In
"Pain is only relevant if it still hurts."
Ed Sheeran, U.N.I
The next day I don't call Antonio like I had not-quite planned on doing, but expected to happen. I told myself it was because I just couldn't stomach his too-happy smile without bursting into flames, but really it was that I knew that one look at his face would have me crying into his shoulder, and I don't want that to happen. That damn asshole, he's making my walls crumble without even trying, and I don't even know how he's doing it. Or how to stop it, really.
The next couple of days consist of me avoiding Nonno like he's the plague, and Romeo wandering around in silent unease, wondering when the volcano will finally blow. He's always hated it when Nonno and I fought, and sometimes I feel bad for doing shit like this to him, but I just can't help it. Nonno is always trying to break down my walls and turn me back into something that can breathe, and I don't want that. It hurts too much to breathe if you're not breathing for anyone. He wouldn't know that though. He's always had someone to breathe for, but I've never had anyone except Feli, and he's not even really here. I mean, sure, I can reach him by phone, but not conveniently, and he doesn't really understand what's going on since he's not here, and there are some things that you just can't say over phone, that you have to say in person. Not that I want to tell him anything. I'm fine with my walls, and my not breathing, even if it does mean I'm lonely. It doesn't matter to me, as long as I'm not lonely enough to throw myself out of a- nevermind.
On the second day before school starts, I finally give in and call him. I'm sitting wrapped up in blankets on my bed, nervously staring at my phone. I finally convince myself to pick the damn thing up. My fingers shake as I dial the number and my hands tremble as I bring the phone to my ear. Suddenly my mouth is dry and I'm not breathing quite right. My chest is tightening and my heart is beating too hard, and I just feel like my soul is too big to fit comfortably in my body.
"Hello?" he answers in his usual way-too-fucking-happy tone. Even though it sounds super lame and possibly bromantic, his voice brings tears to my eyes. He sounds like he cares, oh fuck, he does, but I don't want him to care, because it gets messy when people care.
"Hey," I say weakly. "It's Lovino. I was wondering if you wanted to see my tomato garden now?" Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, he's going to say no, he doesn't want to see me after I've ignored him for so long, he never liked me in the first place, he thinks I'm annoying, he-
"Of course!" he cries happily, nearly busting my eardrum. "I'd love to see you! And your tomatoes!"
"Oh. Cool." Suddenly there's a sick feeling in my stomach, possibly what some people describe as butterflies-though they're more like flesh-eating termites, if you ask me-and I feel like I might throw up.
"Where should we meet?" he asks happily. "And when?"
"Um... the gelato place. You can you get there by yourself now, can't you? And, um, let's say twenty minutes, I have to hop into the shower-not because of you or anything, just because I haven't showered yet today-so yeah."
"Okay, Lovi," he says with a chuckle, making me blush. "Well, see you in twenty minutes then!"
I hang up my cellphone and throw it under my bed. Too. Fucking. Happy. I cover my head with my pillow. Maybe it will be a bit longer than twenty minutes...
(','(','(','('.')';')';')';')
It's actually a bit shorter than twenty minutes. Meaning that I've calmed myself, taken a shower, and gotten dressed in an extremely tasteful outfit in just over ten minutes, leaving me with another ten to wander around for a bit before actually going to the gelato place. Oh fuck, I'm obsessed. Obsessed, I tell you! Fucking fuckernuggets!
I have to avoid Nonno on the way out though, or else the shit will hit the fan in a major way, and that never goes well. For one thing, we're both totally vengeful, so even if one of us wins the argument, the other will still take revenge by burning only their food and stupid shit like that-and yeah, I'm ashamed to say that I started it. Hey, I was fourteen and in the middle of my holy-shit-I'm-a-teenager-everything-is-awkward-now-fuckit stage, and, well, Nonno has never been all that mature, so it turned into an all-stops-pulled-revenge-of-the-Sith sort of thing. It was embarrassing to have friends over, honestly.
I sneak down the stairs, then leave the house the back way, going through the garden and hopping the fence behind it, landing in a small puddle in our neighbor's yard. Seriously? Who the fuck has a puddle in the middle of Rome in the summer?! Did they do it just so that they could get my converse wet? Fucking assholes!
I move through their yard to the street in front of their house, flipping off the old grandpa who lives there, notices me, and tries to spray me with the hose he's using to water his flowers, and then wandering off down the street humming some random song to myself. I'm feeling surprisingly optimistic today, which is weird, since school is starting and that always makes me depressed.
I get to the gelato place around seven minutes early. Antonio isn't there. I didn't expect him to be there. So why does my stomach drop to somewhere around the level of hell when I don't see him? Whatever, I'll just go talk to Maria for a bit, that's always interesting. She gets around, that Maria. I swear, she always has at least three flavored condoms in her pocket, and she's not even strictly straight.
"Oi! Maria!" I walk right on by the counter and into the back part, which has a sort of kitchen-ey place where they make the ice cream homemade, like I own the place. I don't, of course. Nonno's not that rich-well, actually, he is, but he wouldn't buy me an ice cream parlor, even if it is delicious.
"Lovi~?" she asks coyly, popping her head around the corner that leads to the back door. "Is that you?" She shoots me a lascivious grin.
"Don't call me Lovi!" I tell her in an extremely pissed off voice.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," she says with a pouty smirk. "Only Antonio can call you that, hmm?" She says "Antonio" like Michelle's older brother might say "anal sex," which brings an embarrassing blush to my cheeks.
"N-no, no one can call me that!" I insist. "Not even Antonio-I dunno why he does, and I dunno where he got it from-Hey, on a completely unrelated subject, do you know what... um..." I try to remember what Antonio is always calling me. "Um... 'mi querer tomate' or something like that means in Spanish?"
"Do you mean 'mi querer tu tomates?'" she asks, sniggering into her hand. "Because that means 'I love your tomatoes' which, if you look at it wearing my special glasses that filter everything to perverted-" She grabs a pair of glasses from her apron pocket and shoves them on. "-could mean that he likes your balls." she says flatly. I choke on air for a moment.
"H-he- th-that's definitely not what he's s-saying." I finally manage once I'm done dying.
She smirks at me, then shrugs. "Or, he could be saying 'mi tomate querido' which means 'my darling tomato.' That's my only other guess."
I sigh in relief. "Oh, he's definitely saying the second thing-wait, WHAT?!" I shout when I finally catch on. She smirks at me as I recall all the times he's ever called me that-his darling tomato. Tomato, of all things! And his darling! And-oh my god, the man-eating termites in my stomach are really hating on me right now, let me tell you. Like, seriously, I'm going to have a couple big holes gnawed in my stomach soon if they don't calm down.
"Are you okay?" she asks with a laugh. "You look like you're going to be sick!" she says gleefully.
"Sick all over you, asshole!" I growl, wrapping my arms around my stomach. I don't know what this feeling is, but it's fucking pissing me off and I want it to go dig itself a hole and then die in it. Before it can, the little bell above the front door of the gelato bar rings as the door opens, and I instantly run towards it, knowing, somehow, that it's Antonio. When he sees me, his smile lights up the whole room, and he runs forward to hug me.
"Lovi, I haven't seen you in so long, how have you been doing?!" he asks excitedly, hugging me so hard that I have trouble breathing, between him and the butterflies-I mean, termites.
"It's been four days," I grumble breathily into his shirt, sounding a lot more sexy than I mean to. "It hasn't been a long time at all."
"But every day is a hundred years without you!" he says sappily, and it nearly brings tears to my eyes, considering how messed up I'm feeling right now.
"Suuuure," is what I finally settle on after trying and failing to find something clever, rude, or sarcastic to say that doesn't have anything to do with "Save it for the bedroom," which is something I feel would be grossly misinterpreted if said aloud in this little, slightly pervy (cough cough Maria cough cough) gelato bar.
"Are you going to show me your tomatoes then?" he asks happily. (Don't remember what Maria just said, Lovino!) I scuff my shoe against the tiled floor and wonder if it's safe yet. Romeo's probably been out of the house for hours now, since he doesn't like to be around when Nonno and I fight, as I've mentioned before, but Nonno... he's a tricky, stubborn bastard, and he might still be there just in case I decide to come back home. I check my phone real quick, then turn to him and say, "Want to have lunch first? I know this really good restaurant. It serves homemade food from all over the world, and it's really good."
He claps his hands together gleefully at this, smile growing somehow brighter. "Of course!" he says happily. "I'd love to get lunch with you!" I blush then look away from him. This guy... this guy... I don't even know what to say. He makes my stomach try desperately to eat itself.
"Well, okay then, follow me," I mutter quietly, shuffling from the gelato bar. He follows after me happily, humming some random, probably romantic, song under his breath. He's too happy, and too nice, and he pisses me off, and he's been calling me his darling tomato for a couple days now. He's just too... perfect. What's going to go wrong? What's going to get messed up and turn this whole thing sour? There's got to be something. My life does not go perfectly, or even semi-nicely. It just goes straight to hell, no stops, no happy moments, and no second chances.
Ever.
(','(','(','('.')';')';')';')
My not-date with Antonio goes well enough. We eat at this restaurant, make fun of the selection of Spanish and American food-which amounts to paella and disgustingly greasy hamburgers-and order a couple random dishes from the French and Asian sections, both of which turn out to be fish. Which apparently neither of us likes. So we end up leaving the restaurant without eating anything and we wander back to my house. Thankfully, Nonno has gone out, so I heat up some leftover pasta in our microwave and we eat it outside among the tomato plants. Well, we kind of abandon the pasta halfway through and just eat the juicy, ripe tomatoes.
"Hey, Lovi," he says out of blue when I'm on my fifth or so tomato.
"Don't call me that," I say softly, not even meaning it anymore. Hearing him calling me "Lovi" or "mi tomate querido" makes me relaxed, calm, and fills me with this... feeling, of being cared for and loved and... I don't mind it so much anymore, I guess.
"Did you know that, because tomatoes originate from America, really all Europeans are slightly intolerant to them?" he says calmly, taking another bite of tomato. I freeze, pull the tomato from my mouth, then look down at it, unseeing. Then I throw the tomato at him.
"You're lying!" I yell. "I am NOT allergic to tomatoes!" I insist. "Not at all! Not even a little!"
He giggles as he wipes tomato off of his plain red t-shirt. "Suuuure," he says, smiling gleefully. "Don't try to deny it, Lovi. Just accept it: you can't ever eat another tomato again-"
I jump at him and wrestle him to the ground. "Take it back! I can too eat another tomato! I can, and I will!"
He giggles happily at me. "Nope! Never again!"
I scowl at him. "I can too! Look, I will right now!" I sit up, still on top of him, and reach for a nearby tomato. It's only then that I realize that I'm straddling his waist, and we both seem totally calm about it. Trying to ignore my speeding-up heartbeat so that it doesn't move to, well, someplace else, I grab the tomato and pull it off the vine, then look him straight in the eye and take a bite. Juice drips down my chin, and I know that I look extremely sexy, somehow, considering I'm a skinny seventeen-year-old eating a tomato. He watches me, smile fading slightly as I take another bite. And then suddenly I throw the tomato to the side and lean down towards him, and he slowly leans upwards until our noses are nearly touching, and I try to look him in the eye but I can't seem to tear my own eyes from his lips, and then he tilts his head slightly to the side and I lean forward just the tiniest bit and-
"LOVINO!" Nonno shouts from the back door of our house. "What are you doing?!" I jerk away from Antonio, then scramble off of him and gesture for him to leave. He raises an eyebrow at me and I point to the back fence, where I escaped from this morning. He nods at me once, then runs towards it even as I hear Nonno's footsteps coming towards me. I watch as he climbs the fence, looking lean, sexy, muscular-I won't even try to deny that I think that about him anymore-then turn as Nonno reaches me.
"What was that?!" Nonno yells at me. "Who was that?! What did I just see you doing?!"
I don't answer. Instead, I get to my feet and gather Antonio's plate of half-eaten pasta, then my own, and carry them into the house.
"Lovino, answer me!" Nonno yells. He sounds so angry. I can hear it in his voice; he's both angry and extremely worried. The last time he yelled at me like this was the summer I was fifteen, and that was for a matter far less serious than this.
I walk into the kitchen and set the plates in the sink, then slowly turn and walk up the bajillion sets of stairs to my bedroom. He follows me most of the way, still yelling and asking what just happened, but I don't reply, just lock myself in my room and curl up under the covers of my bed. I think back to what just happened and the tears start to trickle out, slowly at first, and then into full-blown sobs that I quickly cut off so that Nonno, who's still standing in front of the door, can't hear them.
What was I doing there? I was leaning down to kiss Antonio. Antonio! He's older than me, and I don't even know him, and- he's a man. As in, male. As in, the same sex as me. As in, that means that I'm fucking gay! Gay! I don't want to be gay! I want to be normal! I want my parents to like me as well as my brothers-both of them-and I want to be normal and not-gay and I'd rather not be hated by half the world just because I'm gay and oh fuck, Nonno saw me, what's he going to think? He's going to kill me, fuck, even though he's in love with his male German friend, he'll kill me for inviting some random guy over, especially when that random guy is older and stronger than me and who knows what could have happened and I don't want him to hate me too! Fuck fuck fuck, why does everything have to be so hard, why can't I just be the same as everyone else, why can't I just be nice, like Feli, who everyone likes better, why can't life just be easy?
And why do I still have to like Antonio, even after all this...?
A/N First off, that thing about tomatoes is true.
Second, THE FEELS going on in this chapter! Well, towards the end, anyways. I mean, I was just so... ASDFGHJKL just writing this! Lovi was so close to kissing Tonio, and then Grandpa Rome showed up and ruined it all, and Lovi's left alone trying to just figure out life and... ARGH! Seriously. I hope you guys like this, because I sure as hell do, and I think you all should too.
Third, the next chapter will be a pretty key chapter, I think. Not quite for the rest of the story, but definitely for, you know, a bit of it. Well, maybe a lot. I dunno. I don't want to spoil it, but I will say that Lovi goes to school in the next chapter, and he finds out something that he really didn't want to know, and yeah, I think we all know what I'm talking about.
Fourth, Maria? From the ice cream bar? She's just some random person I made up on the spot who bought herself a personality and a small spot in the fic. Seriously, she came right off the top of my head, hence the generic, Italian female name. So yeah.
Fifth, this was the shortest chapter so far, but it felt like the longest to me. Like I said before... THE FEELS. Anyways, review, follow, favorite, all that goodness, and thanks to everyone who's done that already! I love you all! :)
(Also, have you heard "Darlin'" by Avril Lavigne? I was listening to that song towards the end of this chapter, and "Worlds Apart" by The Mostar Diving Club during the beginning and middle. Actually, here, links so that you can check these beautiful, gorgeous songs out: /watch?v=6cIUOiElGyQ That's "Darlin'" and here's /watch?v=ZbF2kUuZdKs "Worlds Apart". :)
